Five Days to Midnight

Five Days to Midnight (styled as 5ive Days to Midnight) is a five-part television miniseries which ran on the Sci Fi Channel in June 2004. It stars Timothy Hutton as J.T. Neumeyer, a physicist who discovers a briefcase containing postdated documents and evidence which indicates he will die five days into the future.

The miniseries was five hours long including commercials, each hour dedicated to relating the events of an entire day. It ran for four days, the first episode detailing the events of the first two days.

Physics professor J.T. Neumeyer is celebrating his daughter's tenth birthday, as well as mourning the tenth anniversary of the death of his wife who died giving birth. While at the cemetery, J.T.'s daughter Jesse finds a futuristic briefcase with "Professor J.T. Neumeyer" on it behind her mother's headstone. J.T. thinks that it must belong to some other "Professor J.T. Neumeyer" (despite the unlikelihood that such a person would also live in Seattle and have paid a visit to the same grave), and attempts to open the combination-locked briefcase to discover more about its owner. He finally succeeds by entering his daughter's birth date. Upon opening the briefcase, Neumeyer finds a police file complete with photos, newspaper clippings, and evidence detailing his brutal murder five days in the future.

J.T. is naturally unnerved, but intends to discover the source of the briefcase. At first he thinks it is a prank perpetrated by an exceptionally brilliant but eccentric graduate student named Carl Axelrod. He tracks down Irwin Sikorski, the homicide detective whose name appears on the police file as investigating officer. The detective points out the holes in the story, noting that the file says he missed the autopsy, and he doesn't know the last time he missed an autopsy. J.T. goes home to contemplate the day's events and figure out how to proceed. J.T.'s girlfriend Claudia gives him a blue parka; the case file says that he will be wearing this same coat when he is found dead in five days.

More things from the file start to come true. A rental company sends J.T. a green Jeep Cherokee which also appears in the photos. Sikorski informs J.T. that he had previously scheduled a doctor's appointment on the date of the predicted autopsy, and wouldn't have been able to be there. The back of one of the newspaper clippings in the briefcase is the story of Mandy Murphy, a young woman killed by a falling tree in a windstorm. Acting on this knowledge, J.T. prevents her death, thus altering the future. It isn't until this moment that he is completely convinced that the things in the briefcase are real. Carl is cleared as a suspect and J.T. enlists him in discovering how the briefcase could have come from the future. Another suspect on the list is Claudia's supposed ex-husband, Roy Bremmer, a gangster who has been tracing Claudia's movements. Claudia confesses to J.T. that she is still married to Bremmer, and gives J.T. a gun for protection. Claudia plans to flee before Bremmer can locate her, but J.T. convinces her to stay so that he can protect her. A man in a car across the street is taking pictures of them.

Motives are established for the list of suspects in the police file:

J.T. also seeks to escape his fate by flying out of the city. The plane takes off, to J.T.'s relief. Yet less than an hour into the flight, the plane must return to the city when a passenger becomes dangerously ill.

At the end of the episode, it is reported that Mandy Murphy has died in a horrible car crash. Although J.T prevented her death in one accident, she still died in another accident. J.T. begins to believe that, though he can change the circumstances and details of someone's death, he cannot change someone's ultimate fate, including possibly his own.